On “King Mo” Lawal, who suffered an upset loss to Emanuel
Newton in February and is returning June 19 against Seth
Petruzelli: “I think he’ll rebound well. Look, Seth
has got a pretty long and storied history of knocking off guys who
he wasn’t supposed to knock off in big fights. Mo is a tall order
and Mo has been back training since about 24 hours after the
spinning back fist loss to Emanuel. I know Mo’s 100-percent
focused. I know Mo’s working on every conceivable part of his game.
I know he’s just been studying tape like a wild dog and he’s been
training like his life depends on it, which it does. This is a
huge, important fight for King Mo, and equally it’s a huge,
important fight for Seth. … I think Mo is going to be as prepared
for this fight as we have ever seen him prepared for any fight in
the MMA space. He recognizes the significance. He wasn’t supposed
to lose in that tournament, and that spinning back fist from
Emanuel and Emanuel’s prep won that fight.”

On both Lawal and Renato “Babalu” Sobral losing in the
light heavyweight tournament last season: “If you look at
that last tournament, everybody had Mo pegged to fight Babalu in
the final. That’s the way the brackets were setup was Mo was going
to fight Babalu. Welcome to the world of Mikhail
Zayats and Emanuel Newton. Suddenly you had a final between two
guys nobody had ever heard of but can fight at a wicked level at
205. So both of these guys have got a huge amount to prove. Both of
these guys never anticipated that they were going to get bounced
out of that tournament when they did.”

On whether Lawal took Newton lightly: “I just
think he got caught right on the button with a spinning back fist
that nobody saw coming. I don’t think Emanuel planned to throw it
until he turned and saw the opening. I just think he got caught.
Look, it can happen to anybody, but do I think we’ll see it again
anytime soon? No, I don’t. I don’t think he was ill prepared. He
was in incredible shape. … I just think he got caught by a really
good, really talented fighter.”

On Lawal-Babalu not happening after they weren’t matched
against each other immediately and both lost: “You know
what it breeds, it breeds honesty. It breeds real sports
competition. It breeds legitimate sports competition. Yeah, you
could have very easily just stepped up and gone, ‘You know what,
we’ll make Babalu versus Mo.’ Last weekend we saw a fight that was
exactly like that [Jones vs. Sonnen at UFC 159]. You just make the
fight for the sake of the fact that there’s recognizable names and
one of the guys has got the ability to create a lot of media
[attention], but you come off two losses back to back at 185 and
then you get a shot at the greatest pound-for-pound fighter in the
world at a weight class 20 pounds north of 185? I don’t understand
the logic in that, and we saw the result. That doesn’t make sense
to me. It makes sense to me in the WWE, but it doesn’t make sense
to me from a real sport perspective.”

On Sonnen vs. Jones: “Chael Sonnen gets a shot at
the title against Jon Jones because of what he could say, not how
he could fight. It’s a different situation. There’s nothing
inherently wrong with that situation. I don’t fault it. I don’t
look at it and go, ‘Whoa, there’s just something inherently wrong
and bad about matchmaking and about the way that formula works.’
But it is not sports competition … the way that we understand it in
every other sport that we watch. It’s a sports entertainment
vehicle. I happen to think that there’s a lot of space and a lot of
fan excitement, a lot of fan interest in a different alternative
that more closely resembles what real sports is all about.”